Moon Premieres at Sundance Film Festival

Duncan Jones (the son of David Bowie) made his directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival with his first film Moon.  The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, stationed on a lunar base for a three-year stint to oversee the mining of Helium-3, and Kevin Spacey as the voice of GERTY, the AI computer.  (Maybe cousin to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only less homicidal?)  Since I haven’t seen the movie, I won’t even try to give you a plot summary, but I will point you towards Drew McWeeny’s review on Motion/Captured and James Rocchi’s review on Cinematical.  And if you don’t mind spoilers, io9 has some videos posted.  (I’m not watching these because I don’t want the ending to be given away.)

It goes without saying that the Webmaster and I are eager to see this movie, not just because Duncan Jones is Bowie’s son and Sam Rockwell is a great actor, but also because sci-fi movies that tell a classic sci-fi story are rare these days.  I’ve been a big fan of classic sci-fi writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke since I was a pre-teen and stories like those don’t come around often.  So many sci-fi movies are basically action movies or campy fantasy buffed with a futuristic sheen.  So few movies adress the issues that classic writers like Bradbury and Asimov addressed – where are we as the human race headed in the future?  What are we doing to ourselves with technology?  Are we making ourselves more or less human?  How are we destroying ourselves by trying to make our lives easier?  Now I love campy sci-fi as much as the next geeky chick (as evidenced by the fact that currently all the system sounds on my computer are from The Fifth Element), but true sci-fi is an all-too-rare treat.  Judging from the reviews, I feel pretty comfortable in placing some hope that Moon will be a throw-back to the 1950s radio plays of Dimension X (only without the xenophobia some of those plays expressed!).  In fact, I have so much hope for this film and what it has the possibility to do for sci-fi that I won’t even cheapen it with a Sam Bell/Major Tom allusion.


Comments

2 responses to “Moon Premieres at Sundance Film Festival”

  1. Latetotheshow Avatar
    Latetotheshow

    As a longtime member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (you can’t unjoin, either…they keep you on the rolls even after you die) and wife of a former aerospace guy, I’ve kind if lived in the future for most of my adult life, and, yeah…grown-up science fiction is surprisingly thin on the ground. It seems like half this year’s releases are based on comic books, which is okay if you like that sort of thing, but “Moon” seems like a different thing altogether. Hope it does well in the English-speaking world.

  2. I hope so too. If it does well enough, maybe we’ll see some more movies by Duncan Jones get a wide release.